APOSTLES CREED: “Suffered Under Pontius Pilate”

Another Lawyer joke: A defense attorney was cross examining a coroner about the death of a lawyer in the community. The attorney asks, "Before you signed the death certificate had you taken the man's pulse?" The coroner says, "No." The attorney then asks, "Did you listen for a heart beat?" "No." "So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you?"

The corner, now tired of the brow beating says, "Well, let meput it this way. The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk, but for all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere in a government agency."

Our topic today covers a government official named Pontius Pilate.

Have you ever reasoned out for yourself who really is responsible for killing Jesus? Was it the Jews? Was it the religious establishment (the Pharisees, Sadduccees, and the priests?), was it Herod the King, or was it the Romans?

Could it be called suicide? Or even worse could it have been Almighty God himself?

Let’s wrestle a little with these questions today.

Each Sunday Christians everywhere say two human names as they profess their faith: Mary and Pontius Pilate. That Mary’s name should be included as part of the Apostle’s Creed should come as no surprise. The Virgin Birth has long been a centerpiece of Christology, even though we protestants stay away from declaring that Mary is “god-like” in her articipation.

However, there is something jarring about the inclusion of Pilate in the creeds.

Theologian Karl Barth claimed that running into Pilate’s name in the recitation of the creed was akin to the movement of “a dog into a nice room.” Yet we must take the inclusion as necessary. 

The significance of Pilate’s inclusion comes into focus when one considers that the creeds bypass the life and deeds of Christ’s life, and go straight to his death and resurrection.

We don’t talk miracles, His walking on water; changing water into wine, raising the dead, or His wonderful sermon on the Mount. Those are not part of the creed.

All the aspects of contemporary “Jesus-ology” by asking “what Jesus would do,” the premise to take his words as a code for life, and so forth, are ignored in favor of the simple declaration that, after he was born, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, casting a disgraceful  pall over the that name. 

Reciting Pilate’s name requires we face the challenge of faith which asks us to see a prisoner as God and to identify ourselves with Pilate, who historically says: “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas my treason, Jesus hath undone thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied Thee. I crucified Thee.”

Placing Pilate in the creed forces us to face our own fault in Christ’s suffering, and the frailty of our own faith. 

We don’t know much about Pilate, at least not from the Biblical narrative itself. We know that he was a Roman prefect in charge of Judea, and we know that he was married.

There did emerge, in the first century after Christ’s death, stories concerning Pilate’s fate. St. Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian all give due credence to these reports, which include stories about Pilate’s death by his own hand. 

While the early Church struggled against paganism, confidence was given to the stories that show Pilate affirming the miracles of Christ, proclaiming His deeds as greater than those performed by Rome’s own gods. Such proclamations, even if slightly mythological, point to the central purpose of Pilate’s inclusion in the creeds: as providing an historical record for the man Jesus Christ. 

“Ecce Homo:” behold the man. In beholding the man, we behold God.

Dorothy Sayers wrote that the importance of Christ in front of Pilate is that we no longer behold God-in-his-thusness, as transcendent, abstract, one, and universal, but rather God-in-his-thisness, as embodied in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, as immanent, concrete, triune, and particular. Indeed, we are brought face-to-face with the scandalous particularity of the Christian faith, made more scandalous by God’s weakness and poverty. 

Christ’s passion before Pilate reveals the other side of the dynamic of human sinfulness and Divine Justice, for in taking upon himself the wrath of God, Christ removes our guilt.

But now the roles are reversed: we are Pilate, and Christ judges us. Even as Socrates turns the table on his Athenian accusers so it is they who are really on trial, so also Christ turns the tables on Pilate, letting him know that Pilate has no authority “except it has been given from above.”

Also like Socrates, the threats of those in power mean nothing to those prepared to die, to those who know that dying and suffering is not the worst thing we do as human beings. The truth rests with those who, in humility, are not afraid because they know what is beyond life. 

In the process, a new and different history is revealed, one where Pilate’s free action, works not in the interest of justice but cowers under the influence of both Caesar and the mob, is brought into the economy of salvation.

We see many actions coming together to accomplish Jesus’ crucifixion.

Given, as we read in John 18: 4, that Jesus knew what was to befall him, we now face the mysteries of God’s Will.

Karl Barth wrote, “He suffers, but he does not protest against Pilate having to utter the judgment upon Him. In other words, the State order, the polis, is the area in which his action too, the action of the Eternal Word of God, takes place.” 

In the confrontation between Christ and Pilate, the battle between the powers of this world and divine power comes to a climax, with Christ recognizing Pilate’s limited culpability. Indeed, when Christ tells Pilate “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above,” Pilate takes this not as insolence but as innocence (“Upon this Pilate sought to release him.”). 

The testimony of Christ confused Pilate, who couldn’t take the words of the man in front of him to be either sedition or blasphemy. Conflicted by his belief in the prisoner’s innocence, his wonder at the strange answers he receives, and his inability to see Christ as God, Pilate’s reflections turn back on themselves and the only pole he can grasp is the fear generated when the crowd accuses him of not being Caesar’s friend.

Oliver O’Donovan has argued that only the pathology of the modern mind could relate to Pilate, but I think he is wrong about that. Who of us would not behave like Pilate? 

Christ tells Pilate he came to the world to give witness to the truth about God Himself, and thus then, the truth about who we are: that we only know ourselves when we know God, and only know God when we know the man Jesus Christ.

Pilate’s mystification does not excuse him. But we, knowing the Truth, know that Pilate too suffered: from illusion, performing injustice, and, we imagine, self-contempt. Pilate’s attempt to wash himself clean of his own sin must have looked pitiable to the condemned Man, who alone knew that Pilate, like us, could only be cleansed by the blood of the cross.

It is noteworthy that the Bible never tells us that Jesus smiled or laughed. I’m sure that he did—but the gospels never mention it.

Isaiah 53:3 calls him “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” When he was born, Herod tried to kill him. When he began his ministry, the people in his hometown took offense at him (Mark 6: 3). In the closing hours of his life, he was betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter.

His sufferings did not begin on the cross, but it was his suffering that led him to the cross.

So why then single out Pontius Pilate? Why not Caiaphas or Herod or Judas or the Roman soldiers or the howling mob?

The answer comes from a scene Mel Gibson captured with great power in the movie “The Passion of Christ.” Jesus has just been scourged. He stands before Pilate, covered with blood, his flesh in tatters, his eyes nearly swollen shut, his face so marred that he barely looks human. Pilate looks at him in shock and pity and in a near-whisper says, “Don’t you know I have the power to put to you to death or to free you?”

That wasn’t a boast—it was a statement of sober fact. As the Roman governor of Judea, he alone could condemn a man to death. If it is true that many of the Jewish leaders wanted Jesus dead, it’s also true that they could do nothing without Pilate’s permission.

In the end, Pilate must be held accountable for the death of Jesus. If the Jewish leaders loaded the gun, it was Pilate who pulled the trigger.

In the film, and in the gospels, Pilate comes across as a man who knows that Jesus is innocent yet lacks the courage to set him free. Three times he says, “I find no fault in him.” Pilate knew Jesus had committed no crime worthy of death. But like many a politician caught between a rock and a hard place, he caved in to pressure from his bosses in Rome and from the Jews who wanted Jesus dead.

The path of faith that leads to salvation opened up before Pilate: choose Christ, or choose Caesar (the things of this world). So also it remains open for us, for we stand in Pilate’s place, bear his guilt, share his fears, and think we can extend grace to ourselves.

The final truth is that Christ did not just suffer under Pilate, he suffered for him as well. Just as Jesus suffered for us all. Pilate is a historical figure who lived and puts truth to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Ponder these words from Isaiah 53: 4-5: “Surely he took up our infirmities

and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,and by his wounds we are healed.”

Four times the prophet uses the word “our.” 

Our infirmities. 

Our sorrows. 

Our transgressions. 

Our iniquities.

In some profound way we were all there that day; it was our sins that nailed Christ to the cross. “And the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6).

It is as if our hands held the nails to bind His hands and feet, for we are all guilty and we all receive the grace. 

What character would we have been at the foot of the cross? Amen.